Month: January 2018

Statsticks in Path of Exile never were a common thing up to the release of 3.1. With 3.1 came the War for the Atlas, which brought a set of new Shaper and Elder mods with it. Statsticks have been brought to the forefront of the meta now with physical skills such as Blade Flurry and Ethereal Knives equipping them in the offhand to use. In this article, we will go through what statsticks do and why they are so powerful.

So what is a statstick? A statstick is a weapon equipped in the offhand that generally provides % damage boosts. This comes at the cost of regular weapon mods such as local damage and attack speed, or in a caster’s case, spell critical strike chance and so on. For this reason, statsticks are equipped in the offhand while a normal weapon is in the main hand. Additionally, dual-wielding grants 10% more attack speed, 15% additional block chance, and 20% more attack physical damage while dual wielding. These boosts themselves are quite incredible but its only added upon by the statstick.

The first statsticks were unique items, for there were no Elder or Shaper mods in that time. The first statstick was the Soul Taker. Back before its nerf, it had decent damage (enough to not be considered a statstick) but the real reason people used it was the unique modifier, Insufficient mana doesn’t prevent your melee attacks. This allowed people to completely reserve their mana and in the age of Reduced Mana, that was quite possible.Reduced Mana was like Enlighten but it leveled normally and level 20 gave an insane 66% mana multiplier.

The next big statstick was Death’s Hand. This weapon was used to gain Unholy Might in many reave builds and it was popularized by ZiggyD’s Southpaw Reaver. Unholy Might adds 30% chaos damage as physical damage which is a huge buff since most mobs do not have chaos resistances. Death’s Hand also grants power charge on stun which is free power charge generation on many builds.

Today, we are in a world of rare statsticks. With 3.1 we have earned a host of mods allowing us to gain extra fire, lightning, and chaos damage from shaped sceptres. It’s all pretty straight-forward. You buy it and it doubles your damage. Simple, right? However, there is a catch that makes it even more incredible than it already is. The additional chaos damage “double dips” so to speak, if you are converting all your physical damage to cold, then fire, then lightning, the 20% additional chaos damage mod in the picture above turns into a 60% because you will have converted three times! Added with the other modifiers, that is 140% Additional damage! There are many crazy builds out there and many will come out soon!

Personally, I am excited to see where GGG takes statsticks. Will the take them even farther or nerf them to ES? Either way, keep playing PoE and have fun!